


Crown of Foxglove

by vanitaslaughing



Series: Mark of the Dreamer [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, Gen, Parent-Child Relationship, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-07 01:54:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17951408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitaslaughing/pseuds/vanitaslaughing
Summary: Aranea Highwind was a legend, famous for her strength and perseverance and her undying dedication to the people of Eos during the eternal dark. Her son on the other hand was lanky, not suited for combat, chronically averse to direct sunlight like many children who had been born in the dark, and was often forgotten by the public. There was just nothing remarkable about him—sure, his light hair was unusual and the fact that if he hunched over less he would tower over most people in Niflheim, but otherwise?There was nothing special about him.





	Crown of Foxglove

**Author's Note:**

> set after the ending of Amaranthus

“Are you gonna tell him?”

“I don’t think I should. At least Cor and Ignis advised against it.”

“Mhm. ‘Cause the last time worked so well?”

“Iris.”

“I’m just saying, aren’t you kind of shoving the choice away? He might not get to choose when someone figures out who he really is. I was lucky that it was only you who saw and only Cor and the others who actually knew who I am. I’m scared it’ll turn into another Liliris and Ariadne for you.”

“It won’t. I swear, it won’t, but I guess he’ll be happier if he believes he’s a Niff. No one here calls the High Commander anything other than the High Commander Fleuret. There’s plenty of people called Ravus and he only knows that that was his father’s name. I just… I just don’t want him to choose a supposed ideal over himself.”

“You think Frey would?”

“He’s ten and grew up in the dark, Iris. The sun still amazes him, and he keeps saying that even though everything here in Niflheim is a wreck that he’s never seen that many smiling people. Said he wanted to make sure everyone smiles. If someone told him he would be making the people of Tenebrae very happy with going there and becoming their prince, he would.”

“… Here’s hoping it never comes up, then?”

“It will happen. Just as it happened for you. I’m just scared he’s going to choose other people over himself. Hells, even him just getting mad at me for not telling him about this would be preferable to him ruining his own life for the sake of others. I saw how that went _once._ ”

“Ardyn…?”

“Ardyn. And I swear, even if Frey never talks to me again once he finds out one way or another, I won’t let him become another idiot doing everything in his power to keep people happy. So no. I won’t tell him. ‘Cause that way, he’s gonna grow up thinking of himself as Frey Highwind the Niff instead of Frey Fleuret who owes something to Tenebrae.”

* * *

Were his mother here, he was fairly certain that she would be be talking about inevitability again. Dreamers had the unfortunate tendency to do that—and his mother was the first example that he had ever had the chance to examine. Once the sun had risen, the world had changed.

Frey had been born in darkness. He’d heard teenagers talk about the sun even though they themselves barely remembered it, and the adults had always looked so serious when they mentioned. The most dire-looking people whenever it came to the topic of sunrise were the people his mother spent the most time with. Every single one of them Dreamers, as he learned after sunrise. He had tried to get some information on that out of his mother, but her adamant refusal to ever talk about this coupled with her seemingly intensifying paranoia about something or other that she titled inevitability whenever he asked about it only frustrated him. Frey Highwind was fifteen, six years after he saw the sun for the first time in his life, when someone gave him information.

Loqi Tummelt was, by any means, the closest thing he had to an uncle. An uncle who lived on the same continent as him at any rate. And thus, when Aranea was asked to come to Lucis for some sort of reunion with the others, he was left with the man. Frey pounced on the opportunity, used this situation to his advantage, and soon got a halfway satisfactory answer.

His mother was meeting with her fellow Dreamers.

Dreamers were people who reincarnated over and over again until the wish they made when they first died came true.

His mother would not be reincarnating, and neither would be any of the people she met with. They were on the last cycle. Their Marks had burnt out.

And last but certainly not least, Loqi sighed loudly and said that no, the inevitability that Aranea was talking about was something else. Something that related to his late father—a man he had not once met because of his untimely demise way before Frey’s birth. A man who he only knew the name of.

Whoever Ravus had been, he linked to inevitability. The inevitability that his mother mentioned—his mother, a Dreamer who had gotten what she wanted.

It was a downright headache for the most part. He’d made a promise to her when he was a kid that he would never mention his father’s name to anyone. Only those closest to her knew about this, and not once did anyone offer to explain.

The only one who ever got close to accidentally saying something was Ignis Scientia. Ignis Scientia was also the first of the dreamers to die, just a few years after he learned what Dreamers were. All things considered, it was better that way. He had been sick for a while on top of his blindness, and if there was one thing that Ignis hated more than being sick was having to rely on someone else to take care of him.

But as time passed and Frey came to terms with the fact that no one would ever tell him the whole story, something changed. It was faint at first, barely more than a strange headache he awoke with on his twentieth birthday. Half a year later he admitted that perhaps it was a migraine.

Now he found himself contemplating inevitability as thirty or so people stared at him as if he had crawled out of a cleft in the earth left by the Infernian himself. He’d always wondered what his mother meant when she muttered to herself that maybe it was unavoidable no matter what they did, that maybe it was a foregone conclusion that something or other would be going wrong. He’d never asked because she always gave him strange half-answers that barely added anything but more questions. Uncle Loqi always called that the sort of oddity that all Dreamers seemed to share; every life stacked another personality into the backs of their heads once their memories awoke again in the current life. Every reincarnation seemed to exist as a concept in their memory, every reincarnation’s opinions on what to decide was there and very, very prominent for all these Dreamers. Perhaps all those past incarnations were telling his mother that whatever she did she would not be able to avoid something.

The elderly woman he’d tried to help up cupped his face.

“Lord Ravus?”

Frey Highwind was the (allegedly adoptive) son of one of the most famous mercenaries to walk Eos. Aranea Highwind was a legend, famous for her strength and perseverance and her undying dedication to the people of Eos during the eternal dark. Her son on the other hand was lanky, not suited for combat, chronically averse to direct sunlight like many children who had been born in the dark, and was often forgotten by the public. There was just nothing remarkable about him—sure, his light hair was unusual and the fact that if he hunched over less he would tower over most people in Niflheim, but otherwise? There was nothing special about him.

Which made the way she looked at him worse, somehow. As if he was a saviour who had come to life just before her eyes.

“Uh-uhm,” he managed to say and wormed his way out of that woman’s hands. But the damage had been done.

That entire group of Tenebraens that had come to visit this harvest festival moved in to stare at him as if he were some sort of exotic animal. They all immediately broke into loud chattering—there was no way he was Ravus, he was too young for that; perhaps a reincarnation; the similarities were definitely there. A miracle.

They called it a miracle as he stood up and awkwardly backed away from the group that stared at him still.

“I-I don’t quite follow?”

And thus Frey Highwind learned about a person who was often skipped when people talked about things. Learned that only those descendants of the Oracle bloodline could have gold light spark from their hands. He heard about Ravus Nox Fleuret for the first time, the late Lunafreya’s older brother. Many things fell into place all at once. His name. Why his mother refused to talk about his father. Why even Uncle Loqi sometimes bit his lips and looked away from him.

* * *

He leaned against the wall in her apartment. They both had keys for each other’s homes now that he was not a kid any longer, but the moment the door opened he threw a look at her. Hopefully his expression was grim enough—then again, news spread fast. Even though she had been out of the country to meet with the last two surviving members of her little group in Lucis, perhaps she had heard in the last seven days since that incident.

And indeed, her expression darkened when she saw him stand there with his arms crossed.

“What, no congrats on the coronation they’re planning for me?”

A deep, heavy sigh. “Frey—“

“They found someone who served Oracle Sylva when she was young. Oh, pardon. _Grandmother Sylva._ Apparently I look _just_ like my father. Makes me wonder why you never told me that… itty-bitty detail about him and apparently my heritage. Though now it makes a _shocking_ amount of sense why you never talked about him.”

She looked _tired_ when she drew a hand over her face and collapsed into an armchair. It made her seem older; not old enough to rival what he remembered of Cor, but definitely older than she actually was. The weight of all those past lives, something whispered in the back of his head, something that he would never experience now that he had made the final connection. Loqi had assumed that he was a Dreamer himself and pointed out the strange birthmark on his ankle. Apparently royals had had something similar but since the Fleuret and Lucis Caelum families were dead there was no way it was what people called a Mark of Royalty. So much for that. But it explained why he never felt like there was something that he had forgotten—that was how most Dreamers tended to describe the period before they remembered who they had been once.

“… I’m sorry, Frey.”

For a moment he considered yelling at her. The former servant had even gone and demanded to check if he had that birthmark; and that was why the people of Tenebrae wanted him crowned as soon as possible. An illegitimate heir was still an heir. It meant that the Fleuret bloodline hadn’t died with his father, no matter who his birth mother was—most people still believed that Aranea was covering for Ravus and whoever his mysterious mother was.

“You kept saying it was inevitable, but couldn’t you at least have filled _me_ in?”

Another heavy sigh. She muttered something about a Liliris and an Ariadne, and it took him a moment to register that she had likely experienced something similar in the past. Then she looked at him properly. “And what would you have done had I told you?”

“What…?”

“What would you have done, Frey, had I told you you’re technically the Prince of Tenebrae and only living Fleuret? Would you have marched to Tenebrae to lay claim to your throne? Would you have kept quiet to keep the peace that we all worked so hard to keep? Or would you have frozen, uncertain what to do, and let history decide for you?”

That was… a good question, now that she asked it.

“It’s inevitable that someone finds out, one way or another. Heritage is hard to keep secret, even under a proper cover like the last living Lucis Caelum. Some people are pointing out the similarities between her daughter and the late King Noctis, I’m surprised you turned twenty-fucking-four before anyone noticed. You do look like your father. Hell, one might think good ol’ High Commander Ravus Nox Fleuret rose from the dead to haunt us for his execution.” There was a bitter look on her face. “But if I had told you, maybe you’d have turned into exactly that. Maybe not a vengeful revenant, but living up to the memories of a person you never got to meet. In death they kind of glorified him, made him some sort of selfless brother on a desperate quest and kind of forgot he fucked over Insomnia and nearly all of Lucis with his single-minded drive to keep his sister save, and if he had to _murder_ King Noctis for that to succeed.”

Aranea gestured almost helplessly, and all of a sudden Frey was painfully aware of how old she had gotten. Fifteen years since the sun rose—and most of her friends had died by now. Either of age or after long sickness, but none of them particularly pleasant deaths. With how the MTs were built to not last long, Aranea likely knew that before long she would have to bury Prompto and Loqi and she’d be down to the Amicitias. Gladiolus, who lived on the other end of the world, a high-ranking member of the Lucian government; Iris, who also lived on the other end of the world, in Lestallum with her ten-year-old daughter and her husband working across the country.

He had forgotten that they were both busy people now rather than a busy mother and a son kept safe in the brightly lit city. The sun rose. The sun set. It wasn’t eternal darkness with the howls of Daemons just outside the city perimeter.

“Well? What would you have done? As a teenager, hells, as kid living in Lestallum?”

He blinked a few times and walked over to her. He let himself fall onto the couch. “Dunno. Honestly I’m reeling that the High Commander no one ever calls by his name’s my father. Thought the Oracle bloodline was all saints and stuff.”

Aranea sighed heavily. “Guess Dreamers never learn, huh. I made a similar mistake in a past life, and it cost me. Cost me my best friend, her sanity, my life, the whole package deal. I just thought maybe this time nothing bad would happen.”

“Mum, I don’t think anyone’s gonna die if I go to Tenebrae.”

“Yeah, someone’s gonna die. You. Or, well, Frey Highwind is gonna die. Everyone, say hello to His Majesty Frey Fleuret, first King of Tenebrae.”

Now that he heard someone else say it out loud, he realised he was _terrified._ All his life people had assumed he had been adopted, all his life he had considered himself a Niff. Not the standoffish kind of Niff, but the sort of person who would shape the country and make certain that in the future, no empire would rise to lay claim to all of Eos again. The Crystal and the Ring of the Lucii were gone. Magic was gone; even whoever the mysterious living Lucis Caelums were they would not be flinging spells around. Neither would he be, now that he thought about what he had heard about Oracle Lunafreya. His _aunt._

Frey Highwind was a Niff through and through; it was the language he spoke on top of Eosian and half-baked Lucian he’d picked up as kid in the City of Light.

Frey Fleuret was a 24-year-old man who likely would only be a figurehead for Tenebrae. Look at us, the country would be saying by crowning him without giving him any ruling power, we have the Blood of the Oracle still. The gods that abandoned us have given us a wonderful royal.

He probably paled visibly because his mother got up and sat down next to him; then she started drawing her fingers through his hair. “I should’ve said something. If only to make that choice easier for you.”

He blinked a couple of times. “Would it really be a choice if it was easy, though? I mean, you made lots of tough ones in this life as Aranea Highwind; who the hell knows what other shit you made decisions about in your past ones?”

There was that long, dark look that looked so familiar. The look she normally wore when she talked about inevitability, but this time around she let out a dark chuckle. “Oh, plenty of them, foolish boy.”

He was mad, yes. By the gods, Frey was mad. But he was starting to understand why his mother hadn’t told him a damned thing—and even through all that, she was still his mother. The same woman who had been there for each and every little thing in his life no matter how busy she was.

“Mum?”

“Yes, Frey?”

“Do you think those people would get mad if I told them to go stuff it?”

“Yes. But perhaps if you talked less like a Niff and more like a proper royal, maybe they’d understand.”

He sat up. “I’m not good at that.”

There was a familiar sparkle in her eyes now. “Good thing I spent ridiculous amounts of time talking with royalty but especially your father. What do you want to tell them?”

* * *

“… and that is why I have to refuse. Tenebrae is fine. It is a lovely country that I have visited and will be visiting a lot more now that I know who my father is, but I am not what Tenebrae needs.”

The surprised silence was perhaps the worst part about it, but after what felt like an eternity, the people all bowed. Some clapped.

Even the disappointed-looking former family servants all nodded eventually and accepted that Frey Fleuret was not a person that existed.

He’d told them that the country had managed what his aunt would have wanted it to manage entirely without royals and Oracles, and therefore he himself was not needed like that. Sure, he would accept a noble title from Tenebrae—that seemed only right. But he would refuse a throne based on the fact that Tenebrae’s government worked just fine. Frey Fleuret was not a man who would be sitting on the throne because that man did not exist at all. He hadn’t learned the country’s history, hadn’t learned its language, did not know a single thing about the Fleuret family’s history. And while he could learn all that it would make him a copycat king at best, and a poor show of manners at worst.

Frey Highwind existed on the other hand, and he got on his knees to deliver that, Frey Highwind existed and he was going to do his utmost to learn about Tenebrae. He would do just about anything to ensure that Niflheim and Tenebrae were on good terms, that the peace would be everlasting.

Just as his mother and his father had been a Niff and a Tenebraen who had put their differences aside and became friends in the face of seemingly insurmountable differences. Just as his aunt believed that together the countries of Eos would be stronger.

He wasn’t an Oracle. He wasn’t a royal either.

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t try.

Maybe that sort of thing in the wake of the people recovering from endless dark even fifteen years later was inevitable. Frey wasn’t a Dreamer like his mother, would never be one—but inevitability didn’t have to mean it all had to end in drama. All they had to do was talk it out.

One of the servants laughed and said that maybe they had been wrong to see Ravus in him—the similarities were there, yes, but Frey seemed completely different.

* * *

“Now, now. You’re acting like Iggy did whenever Noct had to talk in front of a group of people.”

“Ugh. I can’t believe he managed to say it that eloquently. He’s never been good at words, I was scared they’d misunderstand his intentions and demand he goes with them anyway.”

“Come on, did you really think he was gonna mess it up?”

“Well, duh. He’s _my_ kid, lanky slouchy bastard or no. And if there’s one thing I excel at, Prompto, it’s fucking up. Royally.”

“Well, you certainly fucked royally—“

“Stop right there if you wanna keep the tongue, Gemmae.”

“Ahaha. Anyway, as I was trying to say. Sure, you messed up. As Fa, as Ariadne, as Big Sis Rose, as Aranea. Hell, Frey’s the result of you messing up _royally,_ but y’know. He came out better for it in the end. Good kid. Smart when he’s not mouthing off. Reminds me of what Ignis was like way back in the beginning.”

“You think so?”

“Well, not sure about the Ignis thing, but everything else, yeah. You raised him well, Aranea.”

“… Thanks, Prompto.”


End file.
